Bouchet Valérie, Huot Heather, Goldstein Richard
Section of Molecular Genetics, Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, The Maxwell Finland Laboratory for Infectious Diseases, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center, BioSquare-III, Boston, MA 02118, USA.
Clin Microbiol Rev. 2008 Apr;21(2):262-73, table of contents. doi: 10.1128/CMR.00026-07.
Nearly 2,000 ribotyping-based studies exist, ranging from epidemiology to phylogeny and taxonomy. None precisely reveals the molecular genetic basis, with many incorrectly attributing detected polymorphisms to rRNA gene sequences. Based on in silico genomics, we demonstrate that ribotype polymorphisms result from sequence variability in neutral housekeeping genes flanking rRNA operons, with rRNA gene sequences serving solely as conserved, flank-linked tags. We also reveal that from such an informatics perspective, it is readily feasible a priori to design an interpretable ribotyping scheme for a genomically sequenced microbial species, and we discuss limitations to the basic restriction fragment length polymorphism-based method as well as alternate PCR ribotyping-based schemes.
目前已有近2000项基于核糖体分型的研究,涵盖从流行病学到系统发育和分类学等领域。但没有一项研究能精确揭示其分子遗传基础,许多研究将检测到的多态性错误地归因于rRNA基因序列。基于计算机基因组学,我们证明核糖体分型多态性是由rRNA操纵子侧翼中性管家基因的序列变异性导致的,rRNA基因序列仅作为保守的、侧翼连接的标签。我们还揭示,从这样的信息学角度来看,事先为基因组已测序的微生物物种设计一个可解释的核糖体分型方案是完全可行的,并且我们讨论了基于基本限制性片段长度多态性方法以及基于PCR核糖体分型替代方案的局限性。